Why am I launching an Unaccelerator?

Let’s imagine that you’ve decided to start your own business. But you’re not sure how to go about it, and it feels daunting to quit your job and figure out how to do it by yourself. Maybe you’ve got a couple of friends who want to do it with you. But none of you has done this before, and there are significant gaps in your knowledge.

You can read books and blogs, watch tons of “inspirational” YouTube videos, even do a course. But the most comprehensive option these days is an accelerator or startup bootcamp. The best of them will:

1. Provide you with a curriculum or framework to follow as you go from idea to investment readiness.

2. Surround yourself with mentors who’ve been there and done it.

3. Introduce you to a cohort of people who are going through the same experience as you.

4. Introduce you to investors during a ‘demo day’ and help you perfect your pitch.

Most accelerators assume everyone is building a business that needs funding. Indeed, their business model depends on taking equity from founders, getting investors, and cashing out on an exit. But most founders don’t necessarily need investment. Most businesses can be built through bootstrapping.

Worse, an investment-centric approach often has pernicious effects. The returns investors require can force founders to chase unicorns, instead of building real businesses. This means that they take on lots of unnecessary risk in the race for growth, as opposed to figuring out how to become profitable as soon as possible. 

Finally, Accelerators send you on your way at the end of 6–13 weeks. They have a “one size fits all” approach which assumes 13 weeks is long enough. A strange and limited approach for what is necessarily a process of discovery and exploration.

We need a new model

We need a new, founder-centric model that addresses these shortcomings.

First, why do most people want to start a business? There are a variety of reasons, but most see the business as a means to an end, not an end in itself.

In my experience working with hundreds of founders, most of them are not building businesses primarily because they want to become filthy rich or famous. And those that are are the least likely to succeed.

Most of them decide to start businesses because they want some form of autonomy:

• Autonomy to do work that matters to them, because of a sense of purpose or vision.

• Autonomy to do work they intrinsically enjoy so much it feels like play.

• Autonomy to set their own hours and work from where they like.

• And yes, financial autonomy, but usually defined as ‘enough’ as opposed to ‘as much as possible.’

Going for investment–especially too early–can mean compromising this autonomy to pursue investors’ legitimate agendas. This is necessary if your vision is sending rockets to Mars, but it’s best avoided or delayed in most cases.

Second, building a business –especially an interesting and original one– is a creative craft. It’s a process of discovery and exploration, which cannot easily be shoehorned into thirteen weeks. 

If you consider the great artists in literature, film, etc., they work on two levels simultaneously. They are focused on making their current book, film, painting, or album as good as possible. But these performances are also vehicles to improve their craft, so they can do better the next time. That is what drives them–the practice of continuous creative evolution.

The same is true of the great entrepreneurs: Edison, Jobs, and Musk for example. The founder’s craft is fundamentally the practice of ‘earning secrets’. It’s following your curiosity, noticing opportunities others don’t see, and doing the work to develop deep insights so that you can create meaningfully different products. It’s not linear, and it doesn’t happen on a schedule. 

If entrepreneurship is a lifetime creative craft, founders need a place to learn and practice their craft which mirrors the way artists and crafts people learn theirs. At different times in history, these places have been called guilds, ateliers, studios, etc. We need communities of practice, where founders can meet other founders and learn how to do it better together.

I’ve decided to practice what I preach and launch one, keeping the best elements of an accelerator, but doubling down on creating a place for founders to ’choose their own adventure’. Here are the highlights:

• It’s a community membership model, including courses, coaching, and mutual accountability.

• We do not take equity.

• We don’t assume you necessarily need investment. We will help you decide. If you do need it, we will help you get investment-ready.

• We don’t send you on your way at the end of your cohort. We want this to be a long-term relationship, where we work together as long as we can add value to your journey.

• It’s an Unaccelerator, not a decelerator. You choose your own pace but keep going forward. As the US Navy Seals say:

  "Slow is smooth, smooth is fast"

There’s more info here. I’m launching in early March with a small alpha cohort. There are still a few places left. If you know anyone who is in the early stages of building a business or is ready to start, please let them know.

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